William Hunt oral history part 5

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William Hunt oral history part 5

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Part 5 of 5, from 2 CDs marked "20 SB Manchester Res. L/C William Hunt, No. 17127. WW1 memories". 19.29 mins duration, chapter 5 of 5: friends and some members of his county hockey team (he later played for England after the war, 1925) were killed / scared stiff before going over the top, a terrible feeling / treatment of British prisoners by the British authorities was very poor / living day to day in the trenches / narrow escape in a poorly constructed dugout opposite Fricourt, a German shell landed in the middle but did not go off - broke a man’s leg, but did not explode / Hamlen 19 camp, three of the prisoners were sent to Hanover with a large lamp to be repaired, and the German guard gave the prisoners his rifle when he went into a farmhouse to collect some eggs, and because of the delay waiting for a train the guard took them to a friend’s house where they drank wine together, women on the train were hiding eggs to take into Hanover, an egg was dropped but was scooped up and eaten raw by what looked like a businessman / on another occasion a guard took some prisoners to an estaminet for a beer, walking in the gutter / with exchange prisoners to Aachen near the border, in a big building, Spanish Flu (influenza) and many deaths, but the exchange did not happen / a mixture of German, French and Russian was spoken in camp / the Russians in particular were poorly kept, no parcels form home / an unwanted homosexual encounter in the camp which was stopped before it began / some prisoners moved to farms “did very well” with the women, some wanted to get away from the farms because of the female attention / a few books in camp for prisoners to read, sent from home, but no library / some big camps organised concerts etc., in one camp a prisoner played dance tunes on a violin and so Hunt joined in the barn dance and got quite keen in the end, and carried this on when back to civilian life / job before the army was with an export firm to Shanghai and China, went back but the cotton trade had failed.
William Hunt signed on in 1915 at Manchester Town Hall to the 5th City Battalion, Manchester Regiment. His initial training was at Bellvue, Manchester then Morcambe and finally Grantham, before going to France in December 1915. He fought at Albert and Fricourt and after a spell behind the lines with trench fever was sent back to the front to join the 8th Loyal North Lancashire Regiment at Thiepval where he was injured by mortar fire, wounded through the thigh and taken prisoner on 26th August 1916. He then spent the rest of the war in two or three prisoner of war camps before being repatriated at the end of the war and demobilised at Preston on 19th March 1919.
In his attestation certificate, downloaded from the Ancestry website, Hunt's details include: No. 1712 [?]; Corps: 5th City [?] Batt. Mtsr [Manchester?] Regt; Your name: William Hunt: Address: Rosslyn, Hazelwood Rd, Hale [?], Cheshire; Age: 24 years 10 months; Trade: clerk; Married: no; Previous service: no; Witness to Hunt's signature: K. Howell.
Two CDs of his story have been recorded telling the details of his wartime experiences from signing on to repatriation. A number of photographs of the period are also in the collection and postcards to his fiance